Resumes, Porfolios, & Finding a Job

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Find, Book & Meet Mentors
Meet design mentors from over 40 countries for portfolio review, career advice, mock interviews or leadership advice — all in this global community.

Find a mentor.  ADPList https://www.adplist.org/ is a FREE mentoring platform, mostly for designers (with some developers and instructional designers). Anyone could register an account and grab a time slot with experienced people who volunteer their time on this platform for career advice/portfolio review and many more. 

Job fairs are in September and October. Students do make connections and get job offers from these job fairs.  So if you have any spare time now, I urge you to work on your resumes and online portfolios now.  I promise that you will not have time once classes start.  If you don’t have much material, it’s fine to just put up a shell for now. Include an about me page, link to your resume, contact information, and blocks for future projects. Just getting the content and the style the way you like it will take you at least 1-2 days.

Create a Winning Resume and Portfolio

Resumes

Kate Livingston and Allison Viverette (Grad-CS-Careers@andrew.cmu.edu) are our career placement representatives and are available to give you feedback via email on your resume and portfolio. For resume formats, take a look at the current and alumni students’ resumes on https://metals.hcii.cmu.edu/people/current-students/ Points on your resume should be quantifiable. Here are a few examples from my resume:

  • Recaptured 10% to 20% of program costs annually dramatically increasing center effectiveness by adjusting project budgets according to spend rates.
  • Developed corporate partners program leading to the adoption of our research methodology by EY (Ernst and Young), Pearson, Kaplan, and Carnegie Learning improving learning outcomes for millions of students.
  • Developed summer internship program, diversity workshop, and learning science workshop annually educating 100+ researchers from industry and academia.

The verbs that you use matter. See this article on indeed 195 Action Verbs to Make Your Resume Stand Out to know which ones work the best.

I’ll put links to your resume and portfolio on the METALS website and employers do look at these.

Other sites for resume templates:

Portfolio

You’ll want to make sure your portfolio is mobile ready (can be viewed equally well on a pc, tablet, or phone).  Fortunately, two good options exist.

 Option 1: Create a static portfolio on Google sites:

This is a super easy solution if you have a static website.

Option 2: For dynamic websites use WordPress

    WordPress has some really great portfolio templates that makes this really easy.   You can make a very professional website without any programming experience. A good template that looks nice is Neve or Astra.  You’ll see if you shrink your browser, that this page automatically rearranges itself.  That’s how you know it’s mobile ready.   

    For hosting your portfolio: https://www.hostgator.com is offering WordPress web hosting, domain name, and email for not very expensive!  Also if you haven’t built your portfolio, you can find good WordPress portfolios here: https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/37-simple-wordpress-themes-you-should-try/.  If possible, you can claim your own url or you can host at another site. 

    More WordPress templates can be found at: https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/free-responsive-wordpress-portfolio-themes/

    What makes a good portfolio?  The goal is to present yourself in the best possible light to indicate that you are talented, interesting, and have a great skill set so any company recruiter seeing this would want to hire you.  So you’ll want your resume, a section about you, your interests, another section on interesting projects that you have worked on, and definitely a section on the METALS program and your plans and progress.  As you progress through your classes, you’ll have more to enter.

    Finding a Job

    General Fall Events

    The schedule can be found on handshake that are open to all SCS Master students.

    Make an appointment with your Career Consultant!

    Log into Handshake and schedule an appointment! https://cmu.joinhandshake.com

    You can meet with your Career Consultant to discuss…

    • Mock Interview and/or Interviewing Skills: Discuss how to best prepare for an upcoming interview or practice your interviewing skills in a mock environment
    • Job and/or Internship Search: Questions and assistance with your internship or full-time job search
    • Networking: Learn benefits and strategies for setting up and growing the connections in your professional network
    • Career Exploration: To explore career options in your major, field(s) of interest, etc.
    • Resume / Cover Letter / Portfolio Review: Assistance with (or a review of) your professional written communications
    • Job Offer Evaluation and Negotiation: Once you have received a job offer(s), select this appointment type to discuss the finer points of comparing your offer and negotiating salary, bonus, and benefit options
    • Elevator Pitch and/or Job Fair Preparation: Develop or practice your professional self-introduction when first greeting employers. Learn how to sell yourself as a candidate and make the most of a job fair
    • Graduate School: Questions about researching, selecting, and applying and preparing for graduate school
    • Other: For questions that do not seem to fit into any of the types of appointments

    Where are we located?

    The Career & Professional Development Advising Center is located in the 2nd Floor of the West Wing building (facing the track and football field). Please check in at the front desk and type in your full Carnegie Mellon student email address at the kiosk upon arrival.

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